Calgary traffic: Congestion more common as planners turn to creative, cheap solutions

For frustrated drivers, no end in sight to gridlock

Traffic volume on Deerfot Trail has surged over the past decade as the city has grown.

Photograph by: Ted Rhodes
, Calgary Herald

CALGARY — When city hall released a proposal to upgrade inner-city Crowchild Trail, jaws dropped at not only the potential for an unclogged, free-flow Crow, but also the plan’s $1-billion cost and the scores of homes that would be demolished for exit ramps.

Then, managers spirited away the plan to be retooled, and likely scaled down.

Around the same time last month, officials’ phones and email inboxes began lighting up about another road project across town.

At Macleod Trail and Lake Fraser Gate in the heavily congested deep south, the roads department has killed the left-turn red lights during the morning commute hours, for a measly $30,000.

The city’s goal: free-flowing traffic to slash the northbound delay by 90 per cent.

Evergreen resident Derek Fraser has faced such massive jams just to get from his southwest community onto the stretch of Macleod that is busy enough to rival Deerfoot. He recalls a snowy day when that four-kilometre start of his trek took more than 30 minutes, and he just turned around and worked from home.

Then came that $30,000 traffic-light tweak.

“Unless there’s a whole section of the city on holidays, there are no backups anymore,” Fraser said.

Sure, the delays and the slowdowns come further up the line. Congestion and traffic remain the top concerns in the city satisfaction survey, which they traditionally do when fear of crime stays low.

But as Mayor Naheed Nenshi said, the Calgary of his youth, where it was a point of pride to get anywhere within 20 minutes, is long gone. Planners doubt it’s worth it or even possible to build their way back to that mark.

A city report forecasts 3.7 million daily car trips in 2019, compared with 2.8 million in 2006 — more if the city doesn’t grow in the way planners hope. A future without congestion isn’t on the table, but optimists hope for congestion growing less slowly, or with at least less acute misery.

In a city with big traffic pains, transportation planners and politicians have begun focusing on small fixes — more Lake Frasers, fewer Crowchilds.

Because with little new money to play with, and billion-dollar LRT plans competing with expressway plans, it’s hard to expect the city’s focus to be interchanges, interchanges, interchanges. In fact, we may be looking at a future where those long-awaited fixes, such as Macleod and Heritage Drive, are wiped off the map.

“We have to make sure that our network is, from a cost-benefit analysis, as efficient as it can be — given what it takes to make it efficient,” Nenshi said.

“If we had all the money in the world, would we build wider and wider roads? Or would we find other ways of managing congestion through land use, through better transit and so on?”

The reality check

We know the traffic is bad. Really bad. Worse-every-year-so-let’s-stop-letting-people-move-here bad. Bad enough that radio traffic reporters become minor celebrities.

But compared with the rest of North America and Canada? Eh, not so bad. At least not the worst.

Lately, the best traffic stats are crunched and reported through in-car GPS systems, giving companies such as TomTom a rich store of real-time data that cities, armed with less effective road sensors, can only dream of reproducing.

TomTom’s latest Congestion Index report on 26 major cities estimates the average Calgary driver with a half-hour commute faces 73 hours worth of delays in a year. With a downtown concentration of offices almost unparalleled on the continent, Calgary fares worse than Dallas (61) or Chicago (71), the same as New York, and better than Houston (80), Los Angeles (89) and four Canadian cities, including Montreal (92).

Statistics Canada also ranks Calgary behind Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal in terms of average commuting time. This may not be much solace to you when you’re crying into your steering wheel each morning.

“For folks in Calgary, sitting in traffic often feels the way it feels for someone living in Vancouver,” said Jim Bak of Inrix, which publishes a similar scorecard and reports Calgary’s congestion bucking the Canadian trend by getting worse this year.

Calgary wasn’t always in the big leagues of North American traffic, but its own traffic volumes show why we’ve been catching up so quickly.

In 1998 at Deerfoot north of Beddington Trail, traffic was at its peak congestion — more than 700 cars every 15 minutes — for about half an hour, at around 7:15 a.m. In 2012, traffic rose above that volume at 6:15 a.m., peaked at 1,141 cars at 6:30 a.m., and stayed above 700 cars until 9:30 a.m.

Between 2001 and 2011, the number of cars daily on Deerfoot south of Anderson doubled to 120,000. (More on that bottleneck later. Spoiler alert: you won’t like the news.)

The cloverleafs and weaving ramps that worked fine decades ago have failed under the bruising overcapacity crunch of cars and trucks every day. Modern traffic engineering prescribes different solutions, but money for them has proven elusive.

The minor decongestants

Traffic optimization is all the buzz lately at City Hall. A small team of engineers has analyzed some of the worst city bottlenecks, and proposed minor fixes that can have huge benefit.

“For almost the cost of one interchange, we can improve all these intersections. And they’re not big dollars,” said transportation planning director Don Mulligan. “We always say: high-benefit, low-cost projects.”

The optimization budget was $13.8 million this year, about one-quarter the cost of a new interchange. With that, they did eight projects, including Lake Fraser, Anderson-24th, John Laurie-Shaganappi, and other major initiatives.

A $2-million fix at Glenmore Trail and Sarcee Trail, with some minor lane widening and intersection expansions, even drew phone calls of praise from residents of Elbow Valley and Bragg Creek, Ald. Richard Pootmans said.

It also helped reduced the cut-through traffic on Sierra Morena Drive near West Hills shopping centre, where the neighbourhood collector road had become as busy as parts of Elbow Drive.

At budget talks last week, Nenshi led a council move to add $2 million more annually to the optimization budget for tiny “surgical” improvements.

“We’re moving into a world for the next little while where it’s not likely we’ll have any money for mega-projects,” the mayor said. “We’ve got to improve what we’ve got.”

The reality shift

The congestion fixes the transportation department hopes for — and most analysts believe in — have little to do with road construction itself.

Transit will save us, the thinking goes. Working from home will save us. Living closer to work will save us.

For Calgary especially, a less concentrated downtown will save us. With about 130,000 jobs there now, the core will likely hit its cap by 180,000, Mulligan said.

The shift of major employers such as Imperial Oil and Canadian Pacific is believed to be at the vanguard of new major employment hubs. The city is encouraging this so that proportionally less traffic flows into the centre in the morning rush and out in the afternoon.

The city’s transportation forecasting branch has predicted that, if Calgary’s traditional suburban residential growth patterns continued through 2076, Calgarians would collectively travel 80 million kilometres per day on city roads that year, compared with 24 million km per day in 2006.

If Calgary’s denser redevelopment ambitions, spread-out employment centres and the transit and cycling networks grow as intended, that could be only 58 million kilometres. If Calgarians substantially change their driving habits and live closer to work and other daily needs, it could be 38 million, the long-range forecast states.

“It only makes sense. You have more people living closer to all the they need to access in their life,” Mulligan said. “Not just work, or school, but everything.”

But even in that ideal 2076 scenario, the road use will be much heavier than now, and there won’t be that much more road to go around.

“You almost never see congestion disappear,” cautions Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute. “But there are plenty of situations where after high-quality public transit was built, we actually saw congestion either grow slower or less intense.”

He also cautions that expanding roads further won’t help fix congestion, either. A common analyst’s dictum likens traffic to a gas: volumes will expand to fill the container. If congestion or good transit gets cars off the road, highway expansions gets scores of passengers off the buses.

“Once you widen the road, those three (in 10) commuters who are kind of tempted to drive but are deterred by the congestion will suddenly say: ‘Yeah, I might as well take that trip,’” Litman said.

“And over the long term, it becomes additional people because your real-estate agent will say, ‘Now that the highway’s expanded, you can buy a cheaper house 30 kilometres from your job.’”

The creaky old spine (a.k.a. Deerfoot)

While a major expansion of Crowchild is now up in the air, it’s inevitable Calgary’s main overburdened artery gets brought in line with our million-person-city reality. Eventually.

Many have long protested that repairs were overdue at those dreadful two-lane squeezes at Anderson Road and Glenmore Trail. Among them was former alderman Ric McIver — now the Alberta transportation minister in charge of that provincially controlled road.

An extra bridge across Glenmore Trail has been planned for several years, unfunded despite its cost of $40 million or less. Other Alberta highway projects have taken precedent, the minister said.

“The big issue is all the competing priorities and the limited funds,” McIver said.

With ongoing construction of the southeast ring road leg and the recent fixes at 52nd Street S.E., this year would have been the worst time to rebuild part of the Deerfoot, he reasoned.

“We’re just getting to the point where it might actually again in the future come a time where you can consider that.”

When? Keep watching for the line item in annual provincial budgets.

As for the Anderson-Bow Bottom-Deerfoot bottleneck, where traffic growth has been even more severe? It’s even farther afield. The last plans were drafted in 1997, when the city still owned the Deerfoot, and the province hasn’t studied it since.

That upgrade will likely have to wait for the city’s looming takeover of the freeway, said Ald. Shane Keating. As McIver’s Ward 12 successor, he’s carried on the grievances of the rapidly growing and transit-lacking deep southeast.

“The frustration is people feel it’s still just a suburb and we don’t have to worry about it. But it’s not just a suburb anymore,” he said.

Which isn’t to say the Alberta government has ignored Calgary’s highways. There is that $769-million southeast ring road opening next fall.

Alberta Transportation estimates southeast Stoney Trail will handle 35,000 to 45,000 cars daily in its first year. But the ministry predicts it will be only a minor relief valve for the Deerfoot, initially removing 5,000 to 10,000 vehicles — and even that may be short-lived.

“That may not be a permanent condition as traffic patterns may change over time and the effect may spread out over a number of routes,” provincial spokesman Trent Bancarz cautioned.

“For instance, people who are now using 52nd Street may switch to Deerfoot in anticipation that Deerfoot will be less busy, while people who currently use 84th Street may switch to 52nd Street or Stoney Trail SE.”

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